1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to equipment used to blanch nuts, and more particularly is directed towards a simple, adjustable apparatus for blanching peanuts that are difficult to blanch with conventional equipment.
2. The Prior Art
For a great many peanut products, it is common practice in the peanut industry to blanch the peanuts at some stage in their preparation as an end product. The blanching step involves the removal of the thin dark skin from shelled nuts and, typically, this may be done by a variety of different techniques and equipment. An early process involved water blanching in which the nuts were soaked in hot water to loosen the skins, then the nuts were fed along a horizontal belt under oscillating pads which rubbed the skins from the nuts. More recently nuts have been dry blanched.
Usually dry blanching is a three step operation starting with the slitting of the nut skins by passing nuts between a pair of resiliently mounted blades. The nuts are then heated to cause the skin to peel slightly back from the slit portion and, finally, the nuts are transferred onto a moving belt which carries the nuts against fixed abrasive baffles extending above and diagonally across the surface of the moving belt. The abrasive baffles in combination with the moving belt fully remove the dark skin from the nuts. The above prior art is exemplified by the following U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,605,797, 2,699,806 and 3,196,914.
While the foregoing equipment has proven to be very satisfactory in blanching most types of nuts on a mass production basis, it has been found that some types of nuts are more difficult to blanch than others, possibly because of the particular shape of the nut or the tightness of the skin on the nut. In either event, equipment heretofore available has not proven to be satisfactory for blanching efficiently those type of nuts that are considered in the trade to be difficult to blanch.